BioCoder #12

Chapter 5. IndieBio Demo Day 2016

Glen Martin

This spring’s IndieBio Demo Day, held as usual at the Folsom Street Foundry, felt distinctly different from its predecessors. The microbrews still flowed freely if not excessively, and the finger foods were elegant and savory. And as with past Demo Days, the place was packed. People were standing cheek by jowl, save for the fact that very few jowls were in evidence among the largely under-35 crowd.

But the ambience had somehow shifted. Earlier Demo Days were charged with a giddy anticipation of a great but unknown future. The air seemed to crackle with static electricity and ozone. Comparisons with Silicon Valley in the early 1980s were widespread, and they felt apt.

But in the latest event, there was a pervading feeling that DIY biotech was maturing at an accelerating rate. The technology remained as surprising and impressive as ever, but the ancillary infrastructure needed to embed those ideas and prototypes into the real world now felt imminent.

That conceit is IndieBio’s raison d’être. The San Francisco-based biotech accelerator’s mission is to transform diffident and perhaps socially awkward scientists into articulate entrepreneurs who can explain their products and services and attract capital.

“We’re essentially running a four-month boot camp, a really rigorous business school for scientists,” said Ryan Bethencourt, IndieBio’s program director. “Do they love it? No. A lot of them hate it, because we take them way outside of ...